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Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, John Kirby, and Raymond Scott all employed groundbreaking compositional techniques that both bewitched and bewildered the public and critics alike. With Bug Music, clarinetist Don Byron, an inventor and innovator in his own right, has reexamined this substantial body of American music, choosing, as he says, "to combine information from outside sources with one’s individual sense of what is possible.”

Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, John Kirby, and Raymond Scott all employed groundbreaking compositional techniques that both bewitched and bewildered the public and critics alike. With Bug Music, clarinetist Don Byron, an inventor and innovator in his own right, has reexamined this substantial body of American music, choosing, as he says, "to combine information from outside sources with one’s individual sense of what is possible.”

Byron described Music for Six Musicians as an attempt to maintain a compositional voice in an Afro-Caribbean setting. "What I tried to do with each piece was to address compositional problems suggested by the masters of specific rhythms in unusual ways—without destroying the structure of the rhythms," he writes. Of the musicians he gathered for the project, Byron writes: "Not only has everyone worked in an Afro-Caribbean context, but they also have an unusual openness to both 'inside' and 'outside' playing that one rarely finds in the Afro-Caribbean jazz context."